The signing of the ASEAN Charter on 20 November 2007 has set off in knowing ASEAN circles a vigorous debate on the value and significance of the Charter as adopted by ASEAN's leaders.

There are those who regard the framing of the Charter as a great opportunity to overcome what they perceive as the weaknesses and shortcomings of ASEAN and shape the association into a tool for advancing human welfare as they view it. They have been disappointed by the Charter as adopted, deploring its likely failure to change ASEAN in meaningful ways. On the other side are those who acknowledge the imperfections of the Charter but see it as moving ASEAN forward and making it into a more rules-based association with a greater capacity to promote compliance with ASEAN agreements and commitments, including the expanded norms that the Charter affirms.

The criticisms of the Charter have focused on its lack of mechanisms to ensure compliance with ASEAN obligations, including those norms having to do with democracy, human rights and fundamental freedoms, social justice, the rule of law, and good governance. The Charter, for example, provides for no sanctions for the violation of its provisions and of other ASEAN instruments. The critics are also wary of the terms that vest in the ASEAN Summit the final powers of decision, fearing that its decisions would inevitably be politically driven. They place importance on the Charter's expression of the intention to set up an ASEAN human rights body but regret that it contains no specifics.

Those who emphasize the Charter's value point out that it not only confers at long last legal status on the association and reaffirms its existing principles, structures and practices; it also augments them. It proclaims norms that cover not only the relations between states but also the relationship of the state to its citizens. While the Charter provides for no specific sanctions for non-compliance with those norms as well as with other ASEAN commitments and no effective mechanism for their enforcement, they can be invoked in case of egregious violations. The decision making powers of the ASEAN Summit leave room for non-consensual methods of reaching agreement. Details on the ASEAN human rights mechanism will have to be worked out sooner or later; indeed, a task force has already been formed to draw up the terms of reference of the mechanism.

The ASEAN Secretariat is currently preparing the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) Blueprint. The final draft is likely to be ready for consideration at the Forty-first ASEAN Ministerial Meeting (AMM) in July 2008.

The ASCC Blueprint builds on the Vientiane Action Programme and incorporates the purposes and principles of ASEAN as formulated in the ASEAN Charter. The ASCC Blueprint will focus on sustainable development, regional resilience, adherence to common norms and values, and narrowing the developmental gaps in the region. It will have six core elements:

• Human development (education, health, youth);

• Social welfare and protection;

• Social justice and rights;

• Environmental sustainability;

• Common ASEAN identity; and

• Narrowing the development gap

There are a number of challenges in designing the ASCC Blueprint:

• Unlike the ASEAN Economic Community, the ASCC lacks concrete drivers, as the stakeholders for the ASCC are far more diverse and complex.

• While the AEC Blueprint has specific targets and timelines, it will be difficult for the ASCC Blueprint to follow the same format. As many of ASCC goals are driven by national agendas, implementation of initiatives have to be done both at national and regional levels and hence may require two types of scorecards.

• ASEAN member countries may not have a common understanding of social issues, such as values, ethics and social justice. Furthermore, unlike the European Union, ASEAN does not have the institutional capacity to translate these social issues into legislation.

• Unlike the AEC, the ASCC does not enjoy the same level of support or enthusiasm from ASEAN's Dialogue Partners.

• The ASCC does not have a champion. Although the lead ASEAN body for the ASCC is the ASEAN Standing Committee (ASC), it is more preoccupied with political issues.

What seems clear here is that designing the ASCC Blueprint will require a very different approach from that of the AEC Blueprint. For the ASCC to move forward, it is important for the ASEAN processes to recognize a number of key factors:

1. (i) that national initiatives will fundamentally drive the basic ASCC concerns of poverty, equity and quality of life;

2. (ii) that the pace of national initiatives will vary, depending on the stage of development of the legal, regulatory, and institutional frameworks in each state; and

3. (iii) that the linkages between national and regional initiatives will have to be clearly established both to generate synergies and to make a clear case for pursuing certain initiatives at the regional level.

Background

It has taken ASEAN a whole decade to translate its vision of an ASEAN economic community into a blueprint. The beginning was the ASEAN Vision 2020 that was adopted by the ASEAN leaders in December 1997 in Kuala Lumpur. The vision envisaged “a stable, prosperous and highly competitive ASEAN economic region in which there is a free flow of goods, services, investment and freer flow of capital, equitable economic development and reduced poverty and socio-economic disparities” by the year 2020. The Hanoi Plan of Action was issued as a first step to implement the vision.

A further boost came from the Summit in Bali in October 2003, when the leaders signed the Declaration of ASEAN (Bali) Concord II. They declared that the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) shall be the goal of regional economic integration as outlined in the ASEAN Vision 2020. In December 2005, the ASEAN Leaders discussed the acceleration of the AEC to 2015.

Subsequently, the High Level Task Force (HLTF) on ASEAN Economic Integration took up the matter and recommended to the ASEAN Economic Ministers (AEM) that the establishment of the AEC be advanced from 2020 to 2015. They also requested the ASEAN Secretariat to develop “a single and coherent blueprint for advancing the AEC by identifying the characteristics and elements of the AEC by 2015 consistent with the Bali Concord II with clear targets and timelines for implementation of various measures as well as pre-agreed flexibilities to accommodate the interests of the CLMV and other concerned Member Countries”. The AEM endorsed the recommendation and agreed to propose the acceleration of the AEC to the leaders at their Summit in January 2007 in Cebu, the Philippines.

At the ASEAN Summit in November 2007 in Singapore, the leaders adopted the AEC Blueprint. They stated that each ASEAN member country shall abide by and implement the AEC by 2015. They also tasked the concerned Ministers, assisted by the ASEAN Secretariat, to implement the AEC Blueprint and to report regularly on the progress of its implementation through the Council of the ASEAN Economic Community.

The members of ASEAN are some of the most trade-dependent economies in the world today. In recent years the patterns of intra-ASEAN trade and of ASEAN's exports have changed dramatically, driven by factors such as: greater openness in the global economy; the emergence of other low-cost locations for manufacturing in Asia and the rest of the world; rapid technological change; and the increased rate of vertical supply chain atomization. All four are inter-related.

In 2003, partly driven by these changes in the external environment, ASEAN agreed to establish an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) which would transform the region into a “single market and production base, turning the diversity that characterises the region into opportunities for business complementation making the ASEAN a more dynamic and stronger segment of the global supply chain”. However, ASEAN's past attempts at promoting greater economic integration and cooperation have not been very successful. The ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) in particular has not lived up to expectations with utilization of the preferential tariff estimated at low levels — some as low as 5 per cent.

In 2004, the region's leaders agreed to the ASEAN Framework Agreement for the Integration of Priority Sectors in 2004. To give further impetus to the initiative, in 2007, the ASEAN leaders went further and adopted the ASEAN Economic Community Blueprint which sets out the steps to be taken to achieve this ambitious goal by 2015.

Based on two of the key characteristics of the AEC, two major trends can be expected: an increase in intra-regional trade as firms decide to allocate various nodes of their global supply chains in different locations in the region, and a certain degree of price convergence as barriers to trade come down.

The Blueprint, along with the focus on priority sectors, goes a long way in addressing the problems associated with previous attempts at integrating the region. However, while the Blueprint provides the policy measures needed to create the Economic Community, the region lacks the infrastructure needed for the people of the region to fully realize the benefits of integration. Drawing an analogy from the world of electronics, it is akin to having developed the operating system and software for a state-of-the-art computer without the processor and hard drive that can handle them.

Four years since the 10th ASEAN Summit in Vientiane in 2004, the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC) — one of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community — has remained as elusive as ever. The ASCC, as articulated in the Vientiane Action Programme (VAP), embodies the ultimate ASEAN aspiration to improve the quality of life of its peoples, promote equity in sharing the benefits of growth, and foster a shared cultural identity. To be sure, the VAP was unequivocal in specifying the strategies to fulfil these aspirations – building a community of caring societies that address the issues of poverty and equity, promoting sustainable management of the environment and natural resources, managing the social impacts of economic integration, and promoting an ASEAN identity. But the ASEAN process that would implement these strategies has not been easy to put in place.

From the outset, it was envisaged that each of the three pillars of the ASEAN Community – political, economic and sociocultural – would be guided by a blueprint that would set concrete and time-bound targets. While the blueprint of the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) has been completed, that of the ASCC is still a work-in-progress, and ASEAN countries have yet to agree on its structure and implementation modality. Some countries have expressed unease about having to commit to specific milestones; others have suggested that an update of the VAP would be sufficient in lieu of having a blueprint.

The unease about having an ASCC blueprint, which implies some degree of precision in terms of targets and timing, is rooted in a number of reasons. Social sector initiatives have been carried out primarily through project-based (functional) cooperation since the early years of ASEAN. In many cases, functional cooperation projects have been designed without the benefit of rigorous sector analysis, often resulting in poorly designed projects with limited and largely unsustainable benefits. Countries realize that a blueprint that would simply compile or aggregate these projects will not be meaningful. Furthermore, the number of ASEAN functional cooperation areas (sectors) has increased considerably, making it difficult to prioritize projects.

Introduction

After more than four decades, ASEAN is a cluster of nations seeking a legal identity. The establishment of a political and economic identity has long preceded this current exercise. From its early aims of promoting peace and cooperation in the region to the more recent establishment of an economic free trade area, ASEAN has been making its presence felt. Over the past few years, ASEAN has as a group been actively negotiating economic agreements with its trading partners. It has managed to make notable progress on these fronts since its creation, albeit without a central document such as a Charter. So why has it decided to add yet another document to its already ample collection of agreements, declarations, memoranda, and “roadmaps”? This document is meant to be, in a way, the “mother” of all ASEAN documents in the sense of providing an overall legal framework for ASEAN's existence, operations and external relations. The ASEAN Charter was conceived as a necessary step to provide “the legal and institutional framework for ASEAN”. In order to achieve this, the Charter requires all ten members to sign and ratify it.

Purposes

If one were to trace the roots of the Charter's purpose language, one finds much of these in the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the Establishment of the ASEAN Charter. The declared purposes then were that:

• the ASEAN Charter will serve as a legal and institutional framework of ASEAN to support the realization of its goals and objectives;

• the ASEAN Charter will codify all ASEAN norms, rules, and values and reaffirm that ASEAN agreements signed and other instruments adopted before the establishment of the ASEAN Charter shall continue to apply and be legally binding where appropriate;

• the ASEAN Charter will reaffirm principles, goals and ideals contained in ASEAN's milestone agreements.

Soon after this Declaration was issued, an Eminent Persons Group was established to examine and recommend the contents of the Charter.

Introduction

Since the formal adoption of the much-awaited ASEAN Charter in November 2007, opinions have been mixed regarding its impact on the institutional development of the forty-year-old association. At one end of the spectrum are the positive views that commend ASEAN for finally working out a Charter that could provide the legal framework for regional relations in Southeast Asia. At the other end are the critical views that dismiss the Charter as nothing more than a reiteration of the old ASEAN way of doing things – more form, less substance. While debates about the Charter will continue in the months and years to come, it is nevertheless an opportune time to assess where ASEAN is now in institutionalizing regional cooperation in Southeast Asia.

Chartering ASEAN

The ASEAN Charter was formally adopted by ASEAN's leaders on 20 November 2007. A media release from the ASEAN Secretariat noted that “for the first time after 40 years of regional cooperation, ASEAN Member states have codified organic Southeast Asian diplomacy, and listed key principles and purposes of ASEAN”. With thirteen chapters, fifty-five articles and four annexes, the new Charter has essentially laid out the legal and institutional framework of ASEAN. But while the adoption of a charter is certainly a watershed in ASEAN's history, many observers have questioned how much the formal adoption of the Charter has actually achieved.

The former ASEAN Secretary-General, Mr Ong Keng Yong, had declared that “the Charter will serve the organization well in three interrelated ways: (1) formally accord ASEAN legal personality, (2) establish greater institutional accountability and compliance system, and (3) reinforce the perception of ASEAN as a serious regional player in the future of the Asia Pacific region”. This next section will examine each of these issues on the basis of the provisions of the ASEAN Charter.

Legal Personality of ASEAN

This is perhaps the most significant achievement of the Charter. ASEAN officials have explained that the Charter would establish the association as a “juridical personality and a legal entity”, which in turn would bring about a number of advantages. For one thing, the Charter would grant ASEAN legal status under international law and would therefore allow ASEAN to enter transactions in its own right. More significantly, having a charter would be useful in providing a legal framework for incorporating ASEAN decisions, treaties and conventions into the national legislation of member countries.

In considering the future of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the role of ASEAN in it, it would be useful to focus on five issues — participation, the subjects for discussion, the question of ASEAN leadership, the nature of confidence building, and the prospects of preventive diplomacy.

• Participation: The expansion of ARF participation, often driven by the relations of individual participants with applicant countries, could have an impact on the forum's “geographic footprint” and effectiveness.

• Agenda: It would increase the forum's effectiveness if the number of items in the agendas for the ministerial and other senior-level meetings could be reduced, so that discussions could be more thorough, deeper and more focused. The more intensive discussions, however, should not intensify mutual suspicions and animosities and exacerbate divisions. Such a balance would present a challenge to ASEAN leadership.

• ASEAN leadership: In exercising leadership of the ARF, ASEAN must go beyond preparing for meetings and managing the process, although these are important. ASEAN has to ensure both deeper and more thorough treatment of each subject and the promotion of goodwill, amity and consensus. It has to contribute more consistently to ARF ideas and initiatives. At the same time, it must ensure that greater intellectual activism does not result in the loss of its valued neutrality.

• Confidence building: An examination of the ARF's confidence-building function should yield answers to the questions of whether the forum is actually building mutual confidence between the major powers and whether confidence building can be achieved between powers whose strategic interests diverge significantly.

• Preventive diplomacy: In considering the exercise of preventive diplomacy, the ARF should determine in some measure whether that exercise should apply to conflict situations within nations and the relative degrees of attention to be given to “traditional” and “non-traditional” security threats.

As an indicator of the ARF's – and ASEAN's – efficacy as security institutions, Indonesia has not received much help in confronting the numerous threats to its security, which range from border disputes to separatism and communal conflicts to transnational challenges like terrorism, people trafficking and arms smuggling.

Challenges in Implementing the AEC Blueprint

At their summit in November 2007 in Singapore, the ASEAN leaders adopted the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC) Blueprint. The Blueprint is a comprehensive document that was crafted to realize the AEC by 2015. The AEC is envisaged to be:

1. (i) a single market and production base;

2. (ii) a highly competitive economic region;

3. (iii) a region of equitable economic development; and

4. (iv) a region that is fully integrated into the global economy.

With the adoption of the Blueprint, ASEAN is now ready to move into an economic integration process that is driven by clearly defined goals and timelines. However, there are a number of challenges in implementing the Blueprint.

Although the Blueprint is a binding document, there is a serious lack of capacity in ASEAN to enforce it either at the regional or at the national level. Moreover, some goals in the Blueprint are vaguely defined with hardly any milestones. Therefore, in the process of its implementation, signposts will need to be erected to track the progress made towards achieving the goals. Here the development of “scorecards” can be useful, perhaps even critical, in the successful implementation of the Blueprint.

ASEAN appears to be less than transparent regarding disclosing its members' failure to implement economic commitments. While ASEAN has made progress in publicizing its many economic initiatives, it has a rather poor track record in informing the public about the implementation process and outcomes of these initiatives.

Other challenges faced by many member countries in implementing the Blueprint include customs modernization, standards and conformance, and infrastructure development. Hence, there may be a need to establish institutions or mechanisms to monitor the implementation of commitments in the Blueprint. Each member country could begin this process by preparing a more detailed national action plan to implement the AEC Blueprint.

By having a set of peer-review mechanisms based on systematic monitoring and tracking at the regional and national levels, meaningful “signposts” to indicate progress (or the lack thereof) towards achieving the AEC can be established. Systematic efforts at monitoring and tracking the progress would clearly contribute to the successful implementation of the Blueprint. In turn, this could help identify areas in which analysis, policy development and technical inputs would need to be organized.

On 15 April 2008, the ASEAN Studies Centre and the Regional Economic Studies Programme, both of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, organized a workshop on “The ASEAN Community: Unblocking the Roadblocks”. The first endeavour in which the new ASEAN Studies Centre was actively involved, the closed-door workshop gathered Southeast Asian experts on ASEAN for what was essentially a brainstorming session on the nature of the ASEAN Community that the association aspires to be, segmented into its three pillars — the ASEAN Economic Community, the ASEAN Security Community, and the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community. The session examined the benefits expected from regional community building for the people of Southeast Asia and the obstacles that lay on the way to its achievement. The workshop suggested certain measures for removing those obstacles. It then discussed the newly signed ASEAN Charter: the significance of its provisions, how it could help build the ASEAN Community, and how it might fall short of doing so. The workshop also heard short briefing on the aims and functions of the ASEAN Studies Centre and proffered suggestions for it.

A list of the names and contact details of the participants are at the end of this report.

The report, the first in the ASEAN Studies Centre report series, begins with a brief account of the important points raised during the discussions, including the recommendations made. This is followed by short papers by Denis Hew, Hadi Soesastro and Eduardo Pedrosa on the ASEAN Economic Community and regional economic integration; Rodolfo C. Severino on the ASEAN Regional Forum; Carolina S. Guina on the proposed blueprint for the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community; and Locknie Hsu and Mely Caballero-Anthony on the ASEAN Charter.

It is hoped that the summary and the papers will help both policy-makers and the interested public in appreciating the benefits of a comprehensive regional community and what it would take to bring it about.

The 2008 ASEAN Roundtable, an annual event organized by ISEAS, will take place towards the end of July. Supported by the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, it will examine in detail the blueprint adopted for the ASEAN Economic Community.

In considering the future of the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the role of ASEAN in it, it would be useful to focus on five issues — participation, the subjects for discussion, the question of leadership, the nature of confidence building, and the prospects of preventive diplomacy.

Participation

At its August 2007 ministerial meeting, the ARF admitted Sri Lanka as its twenty-seventh participant. The forum had started out with eighteen – the then-six ASEAN members; the then-seven Dialogue Partners; the observers, Papua New Guinea, Vietnam and Laos; and China and Russia, at that time “consultative” partners which were not yet in the ASEAN dialogue system. Despite repeated expressions of resolve to limit the size of the forum through “moratoriums” on the admission of new participants, the ARF has expanded steadily since then. Cambodia and Myanmar entered the forum when, in 1995 and 1996, respectively, they became ASEAN observers on their way to membership. India came in when it became an ASEAN Dialogue Partner in 1996. Mongolia was admitted in 1999, North Korea in 2000, Pakistan in 2004, Timor-Leste in 2005, Bangladesh in 2006, and Sri Lanka in 2007.

The entry of three South Asian states within the space of three years has inevitably raised the question of whether this means that the ARF is expanding its “geographic footprint” from its original coverage of Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia and Oceania to encompass South Asia as well. The admission of the three South Asian nations, in addition to India, was reportedly subject to the condition — whether explicitly or implicitly is not clear — that the forum's “geographic footprint” would not thereby change. In any case, there does not seem to be an interest on the part of any of the states in the subcontinent to raise strictly South Asian issues in the ARF — at least, so far. Moreover, some participants feel more comfortable having several states represent South Asia in the ARF than India alone. Other participants contend that India has a strategic interest and role in East Asia — that is, in the ARF's “geographic footprint” — where the other South Asians do not.

INTRODUCTION

Under BERJAYA, the discourse of development was used as a strategy for political support. In analysing the 1994 Sabah State election, Loh (1997) contended that the issue of development became central to the campaign tactics of the BN during the Mahathir Administration. The discourse of development was employed as a way to convince the Sabah electorate that the opposition government in Sabah, the PBS (Parti Bersatu Sabah, or Sabah United Party), had failed to bring progress and development to Sabah. The BN also introduced the slogan Sabah Baru (New Sabah) to denote a new image of Sabah as a developed state under the care of BN. Under the rhetoric of Sabah Baru, the BN pledged to build a university in Sabah, improve the education system, create low-cost housing, expand rural development programmes, and industrialize the Sabah economy. The ‘developmentalist’ approach or ‘politics of development’ was employed again in the 1999 Sabah State election, together with the successful manipulation of the ‘3Ms’: money politics, the BN electoral machine and the media (Loh 2003). The long list of development plans — forty-four of them published in the local newspaper in twelve days, from 28 February 1999 to 11 March 1999 — also contributed to the BN's success in the election (Loh 2003).

If the 1990s saw ‘development’ discourse in Sabah reach its apogee, it was under BERJAYA that Sabah began to experience the politicization of development on a broader scale. Long before the BN was promising a New [developed] Sabah if the PBS was ousted, Harris had made explicit the link between support for BERJAYA and the benefits of development. After the DAP won the Sandakan Federal constituency during the 1978 Federal election, Harris announced that “the Party BERJAYA's politics was the politics of development”. When the Sandakan electorate voted again for the DAP in the 1982 Federal election, Harris declared to the voters that there would be no development in Sandakan.